I have been thinking about the closeness of our national elections and the power that gives to a small number of voters to control the overall policy of the country. This is the same dynamic that gave us Prohibition. Most jurisdictions where voters were given the chance to decide whether their political jurisdiction would be wet or dry voted down dry preferring to allow the legal and taxed sale of alcohol.
However, the anti-alcohol voters were single issue voters and if you were not for them, you were against them and the anti-alcohol votes could determine the winner of many elections. Thus, prohibition was passed.
Today, the electorate is roughly divided into 45% cores for each party. The remaining 10% cares about any number of issues and many are single issue voters. Taxes, abortion, women's rights, gun control, environment, retirement benefits and the list goes on.
The Presidential candidates have to both cater to their core and get them motivated to vote and pander to these single issue voters. This means that when we get into a situation where serious choices need to be made, we do not get an honest picture of what either candidate will do because they want to win the election and such victory will be determined by this 10% in the single issue category. So the candidates talk out of both sides of their mouth.
It would be far better to have a spirit of cooperation recognition that the views of the 45% that opposed you need to be respected so that problems can be addressed in a bipartisan manner. Then we can make prudent progress on our challenges and the minorities in the middle would not be dominating the majorities.
As for the remaining undecided voters, they apparently do not care about policies, but rather determine who they will vote for based upon some whim other than policy
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